forum search

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sderose
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Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2009 8:46 am

forum search

Postby sderose » Fri Feb 20, 2009 10:25 pm

I just started w/ Inkscape, and did find an answer I needed, but I had to do a Google site search because the relevant words are "too common" for the forum search engine (I was looking for how to make several objects the same size). Presumably this happened because the search engine (whichever it is) has a "stop list" of words to ignore.

Might I suggest that stop lists do not save very much any more, given the amount of space and processor power now available. At least, I would suggest that the stop-list be shrunk by a lot. A message suggested that the engine ignores all words of 3 or fewer (and 15 or more???) characters; doing *just* that, and keeping all words longer than 3 (like "same" and "size") will work a lot better and still save a lot of space, since nearly all the very common words are very short ("the" and "of" alone amount to over 10% of the tokens in typical English prose).

This would also save at least some unneccesary traffic by making it easier for people to find answers themselves (when I did find the answer in the forum archives, the prior questioner commented that he'd had the same problem with forum search).

s

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microUgly
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Re: forum search

Postby microUgly » Sat Feb 21, 2009 8:18 am

phpBB search, and Google search are two very different beasts. If you were to allow all common words a phpBB search would return mostly irrelevant results. Google doesn't suffer this problem because it's has an very sophisticated ranking algorithm based on a multitude of data.

The best that could be done to improve this is allow a Google search from within the site.


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